Both too low, and too high. It is after all, civil, not criminal. I’m sure there are plenty of times you could show the money is dirty, without being able to secure a criminal conviction. Likewise, you can be convicted of a crime yet your money is perfectly ‘clean’.
Civil Forfeiture really needs it’s own process, to justify both taking and keeping someone’s assets. Unrelated to arrests or criminal charges.
Seized assets should only remain seized if they are either proven (via conviction) or admitted (via plea) to be part of the specific crime that is being prosecuted.
The bar should be very high for low-level law enforcement to be able to lay hands on your property.
(same high bar should exist further up the chain, too, of course)
Whatever process you wanna call it, it’ll boil down to the standard for the evidence used to justify seizing the assets. Right now, the process has too low a standard where you only need to assert that the money is more likely than not to be involved in a crime without any court testing of that assertion. Turning it over needs to switch from guilty until proven innocent to the usual standard for a conviction which is innocent until proven guilty.
I’d say that is ok (and the purpose of the policy in the first place, to deny criminals the opportunity to hide their ill-gotten gains)…but there needs to be a pretty quick - as in, like within 48 hours or 5 days - requirement to show cause to a court for them to keep the money. And then a periodic requirement - maybe every month, or even two weeks? - to get continued authorization from the court. With a limit of how many times they can re-authorize before they need to clearly establish the forfeiture should be permanent - so even if the victim is unable to mount a defense in those hearings, the case wont linger on indefinitely (or even require defense counsel be provided).
That alone should curb the speculative forfeitures, since it’ll come with an ongoing burdon and costs to seizing the money, instead of being a free source of funding. Right now, it only is what it is because about the worst consequence of seizing assets is receving a strongly worded letter.
This is like the 5th time you’ve done it, seems like on purpose – the word you’re looking for is “burden”.
The “o” on my keyboard identifies as an “e”. How intollerant and hateful of you. 
LMAO!!
Very 2021 of you, glitch99. You’re gonna fit right in with today’s crazies!
Those who do try to contest Harris County seizures face long waits for justice. Woods’ $41,680 was seized in May 2019, but the agency’s procedural sloth meant he had to wait until this fall—two years and four months—for his case to actually start.
I’m sure the waits has been worse due to covid. Courts got backed up due to quarantines etc.
They should make the Sherriffs office pay the victims 6% interest on that money for the entire thime they had to wait.
I know these are anecdotal, and may be rare examples, but following something kind of like the George Floyd logic, there must be thousands of other forfeitures just as bad or much much worse.
I agree. The claim of these cases being rare and anecdotal is simply no longer believable when stories like this keep happening over and over.
The frequency at which these keep happening points more to a tip of the iceberg statistics where you only hear about them when it reaches media or a law firm able to highlight it properly. For everyone of these, I’d not be surprised if there are not dozens of them you never hear about.
One thing that could change the script is the repayment of attorney fees. If the owner of the property is not charged with any crime and wins their claims, entity that seized the asset should have to pay for legal fees + interest on the property returned. In the case highlighted, the loss of use for the car should be paid for as well. And the money paid back should come from the fund of entity that seized the property. I bet you’d see much faster returns of property when they know the clock is ticking and they’ll owe attorney fees for frivolous seizures.
I think much of this is done by drug task forces. There is so much money pumped into those units that it may be hard to get it changed.
The decision maker in law enforcement that made the baseless forfeiture decisions should be criminally liable for theft and made to personally pay restitution.
Anything that only dings the organization is still just going to come out of tax coffers, and doesn’t really matter to the individuals that are violating people’s rights.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t want the cop who thought maybe a property was involved in drug trafficking to turn a blind eye so that it’s not his hide on the line if he happened to be wrong about a forfeiture.
Bad policy leads to exploits or ineffective enforcement. I wouldn’t want the policy to be so drastic that cops basically refuse to enforce it for fear of retaliation. Much better to improve the process.
Take the analogy of the office where all employees are told that they can help themselves to any supplies they need, nobody’s keeping count. Next thing you know people bring home entire cases of paper, toners, get school supplies for their kids, for their side hustle, etc.
You could add the potential for disciplinary measures if people get too many supplies but that risks having people be short of stuff they actually need because they’re afraid to be deemed in excess of what’s acceptable. Now instead change the policy so that they just need to ask the department secretary for what they need to get it right away and you see much less abuse. Both would probably accomplish the desired goal but I’m not a big fan of discipline after the fact compared to prevention and removing ways to abuse the system in the first place.
There is a difference between a temporary seizure in the course of an actual prosecution of crime, and the kind of arbitrary seizure with no charges ever filed that some of these cases mention.
The latter should be discouraged as aggressively as possible. And when it happens, those certainly seem like cases where criminal denial of rights have taken place.
The courts would be deciding what the bar for reasonable search and seizure are.
I don’t personally think that a cop who “thought maybe” is good enough.
Many of us have ran into certain cops who think a lot of things that are BS.
And that’s how it should be.
But from the cop’s perspective, if they’re gonna be personally liable for theft, damages, etc. if somehow the court disagrees with their reasonable suspicions, they’ll very likely decide it’s too risky. After all they don’t directly benefit from proceeds individually anyway, only as a department/police unit so high risk for no personal benefit. It’d solve the issue but we’d be basically in the same place as having no civil asset forfeiture laws at all if they end up never being enforced.
That’s why the solution is more about expediting the process, so that suspect assets can be frozen, but not indefinitely. Like a court hearing to show cause, within a week or even 3 days. And perhaps a metric that, when a given officer/agent has too many seizures reversed at those hearings, they need someone else to sign off on any futher seizures.
Even if expedited, if the cost to reclaim your property are way higher than the value of the property itself, the system will keep screwing people up. The burden of the property having to prove that it was not connected to a crime is a very high bar that’s completely contrary to everything in our justice system. Guilty until you can prove your innocence should not be the standard for any court decision.
I think your earlier idea of having to charge the owner of the property with a felony within a short period of time or have the property return to them automatically, would work better.
And if you removed the financial incentives for police departments to seize property to pad their budgets along with that, I think you’d see much of the abuses disappear.
Thats how it is now. But a rather standard show cause hearing wouldn’t have to cost the victim anything, the burden would be on the state to convince a judge the seizure has merits.